


a perfect soldier

by SouthSideStory



Series: the day after forever [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Antisemitism, Captain America: The First Avenger, Codependency, Depression, Gun Violence, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Captain America: The First Avenger, Suicidal Thoughts, Torture, Unhealthy Relationships, minor Avengers characters, minor Bucky Barnes/OFC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-18
Updated: 2017-08-18
Packaged: 2018-12-16 20:57:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 20,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11836911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SouthSideStory/pseuds/SouthSideStory
Summary: Steve looks like a stranger these days, but at least the way he smiles at Bucky is the same: soft, fond, and a little bit smitten. It used to bother him, that the friend he considered a brother didn’t see him the same way. He’s never thought any less of Steve for it, but he also wasn’t quite comfortable with being the object of his affection. Now Bucky couldn’t care less how Steve loves him, as long as it means that Steve loves him most.





	1. PRELUDE: the future

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shirasade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shirasade/gifts).



> This piece is for the Stucky Big Bang 2017. It's been a labor of love, and I hope you guys enjoy it. My collaborative partner, shirasade, has made an amazing gifset and a fanvid that couldn't be more apt or beautiful. However, the vid is pretty spoilerific, so she'll be posting it tomorrow after all eight parts of this fic are up. If you plan to read this story, I very strongly encourage you NOT to watch the video until after you've finished... then watch it about 50 times because it's awesome!
> 
> Got to give a big thank you to my betas, deeppoeticgirl and ReyloTrashCompactor. This story wouldn't be what it is without you ladies.

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“Together we understood what terror was: you’re not human anymore. You’re a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted to believe in. You know you’re about to die. And it’s not a movie and you aren’t a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait.”

Tim O’Brien, _The Things They Carried_

.

.

**PRELUDE: the future**

_This is the truest lie he’ll ever tell: there’s always time to start over._

**{1945 - 2014}**

.

.

There are letters in Sergeant Barnes’s desk, locked out of sight. No one finds them until after the _Valkyrie_ falls, taking Steve into the northern Atlantic with her. When Peggy uncovers the letters, she almost cries, because no one lines up notes in this way unless they never intend to come home. She personally delivers each one to the Howling Commandos and the sergeant’s family.

Mrs. Barnes takes the letter with steady hands, but her smile trembles when she says, “He always was so much like his father. George was a soldier too, you know.”

The letter to Steve she can’t bear to open, and besides, it isn’t hers to read anyway.

So Peggy tucks it away in a folder, right behind the 1A stamp that made a great man into a hero. Boxes it up and hides it away on an obscure, dusty shelf in the basement. If anyone ever disturbs that file, it won’t be for a long, long time.

.

.

Phil Coulson has been an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. for exactly two weeks when he asks Director Fury for permission to search the old S.S.R. archives.

“Why?” Fury asks. “That shit’s a mess. Hasn’t been organized in fifty years, and half of it’s water damaged.”

“Water damaged?”

Fury says, “Don’t ask,” in a tone that makes Phil stand up straighter.

“Um, yes, sir.”

Fury looks at him expectantly, then says, voice slow and careful, like he’s speaking to a particularly stupid child, “You didn’t answer my question, agent. What are you planning to look for in the archives?”

It takes all of Phil’s willpower not to look away when he says, “I’m a fan of Captain America, sir. I was hoping to find his original S.S.R. file.”

“A fan.” Fury’s frown is so disdainful that Phil blushes, but he refuses to show any shame. So what if he owns Cap trading cards? There’s nobody better to look up to than Steve Rogers.

“I understand if it wouldn’t be appropriate to give me clearance, sir.” Phil shrugs, smiles, and says, “I just thought I’d ask.”

Fury gives him a considering look. “Go ahead, but if you find that file, bring it straight to me. It might be useful to have.”

.

.

Two years after Nick gives Coulson permission to search the archives, he shows up at the top floor of the Triskelion carrying a battered old box that smells like mildew.

“What the hell is that, and what is it doing in my office?”

Coulson grins, wider and happier than any self-respecting agent ought to smile in front of their director, and says, “I found it, sir. Captain Rogers’s file.”

Nick wishes he still had two good eyes so he could glare at Coulson with both of them. “You’ve been looking for that file for two years.”

“Yes, sir,” Coulson says brightly. “In my defense, the archives are huge and in as poor condition as you said they would be.”

Nick sighs, waves at the box, and asks, “Well did you at least find anything good in there?”

“I did, sir. I never would’ve guessed it, but apparently Captain Rogers was rejected by the Army six times from ‘41 to ‘43, and looking at the full list of his ailments, I can see why. Did you know that he was color blind before the serum? That’s one you don’t learn in history class—”

Nick stands up, walks around his desk, and takes the file out of Coulson’s hands. “That’ll be all, agent.”

Coulson’s shoulders square, and in a moment he’s back to the calm professionalism that Nick has learned to expect from him. “There’s one other thing, sir. A letter, addressed to Captain Rogers. It’s still sealed, so I imagine that whoever put it there felt that it should be saved for the captain’s eyes alone.”

Nick dismisses Coulson, takes the letter from its hiding place, and opens it.

.

.

“Read this.”

Natasha looks up at Nick, trying to evaluate his expression, but all she sees is the same implacable, harried confidence that defined his directorship of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Then she reads the name on the front of the yellowed envelope and asks, “What is it?”

“A letter to Cap from Sergeant Barnes, dated January 20, 1945.” Nick’s smile is grim. “A suicide note.”

Not much surprises Natasha, but this does. Still, she makes sure not to show it. “And you’re giving it to me. Why?”

Nick nods at the letter, then says, “I want you to decide whether or not Cap should have it. Now that the truth about the Winter Soldier is out, there are things he’ll want to know. If you think he can handle it.”

Natasha pulls the letter out of its tender, time-worn envelope, opens it and reads the whole thing in less than a minute. It takes longer, much longer, before she says, “Well. That’s not what I was expecting.”

.

.

The day after he’s released from the hospital, Natasha gives Steve a faded file folder, ragged around the edges, and says, “There’s something you need to see.”

Inside his S.S.R. file, Steve finds a letter with his name on it, written in Bucky’s juvenile scrawl. Forever frozen in a seventh grader’s awkward hand, thanks to the education he didn’t get to finish.

It starts with _You did everything you could_ and ends with _I’ve always loved you, same as you loved me_. Steve reads the letter over and over, too starved to care that he’s swallowing lies.

.

.


	2. FUGUE: where are we going?

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**FUGUE: where are we going?**

_Maybe he can learn to love back if he just tries—and maybe, if he wishes for it hard enough, the sun will never set and the war will end._

**{1943}**

.

.

It’s Bucky’s last night in Brooklyn, and he spends it at the Stark Expo, looking to a future that he isn’t sure he’s going to see.

An hour ago, he picked Steve up out of the dirt, protected him from a new bully, same as he’s done every other day all his life. It might be exhausting, cleaning up Steve’s messes, if he didn’t love him so damn much. Because it is love, what he feels—if not the same sort of love that Steve harbors for him.

He asked, “Where are we going?” and all Bucky wanted to say back was, “ _We_ aren’t going anywhere.”

They’re about to be separated, stuck on opposite sides of the ocean, and it isn’t fair. If Steve was as strong in body as he is in heart, he’d make the best kind of soldier. But Bucky, he’ll only do what he has to, kill to make it home, back to his mother and his sisters and Steve. Steve, who might as well be a little brother to him, always in need of rescue, but quick to rescue Bucky back in all the ways that he can.

He wants to be honest with Steve, but “the future” is a much easier answer to give.

.

.


	3. FIRST MOVEMENT: good becomes great; bad becomes worse

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.

**FIRST MOVEMENT: good becomes great; bad becomes worse**

_No one could build a soldier from a man. But he was beaten, broken, then burnt to the ground, and a soldier crawled out of the ashes._

**{1943}**

.

.

Every time he falls asleep, Bucky dreams of that goddamned table. How the straps bit into his skin, sharp and stifling. The pinprick of needles, piercing tender flesh, flooding his veins with fire. For weeks, Zola left him to piss his pants and sob like a child, repeating his service number over and over, because giving up anything else would be treason.

Before Kreischberg, Bucky was a proud man, but Hydra’s methods broke him. Beatings and electric shocks and syringes full of burning blue drugs left no room for anything besides fear.

Now he lies awake, running his fingers over the cold metal of his dog tags. Every indention is so familiar that he could read it with his eyes closed.

_Barnes, James B._ _32557038\. T43-44. O. H._

H for Hebrew. The only reason he was selected for Hydra’s special experiments.

_I’ll take this one_ , Zola said, when he looked at Bucky’s dog tags. _Jews make the best subjects._

.

.

When Agent Carter strolls into a pub full of drinking soldiers like she owns the place, Bucky does his best to distract her from Steve. It’s an ugly way to act, petty and jealous, but he doesn’t need any reminders that he’s a ruined, faded version of the man he used to be. And there’s nothing quite like a beautiful dame’s disinterest to rub salt in that wound.

Steve and Carter look at each other like they’re the only man and woman on earth, as if the rest of the world has fallen away, and Bucky hates it.

After she leaves, he laughs. “I’m invisible. I’m turning into you,” Bucky says. “This is a horrible dream.”

Not so long ago, Bucky was the only one who knew what Steve was worth, who saw his courage and kindness before his frail body. Now that the entire U.S. Army is kissing Captain America’s ass, he doesn’t want his best friend to forget who he loved first.

Bucky drinks three whiskeys. They must be weaker than they taste, because he feels dispiritingly sober when he and Steve head back toward base. It’s cold outside, much colder than November in Brooklyn, and something about the city at night seems wrong. The roads are too dark, the buildings too old, and there’s a sense of permanency that New York lacks. Like these cobblestone streets have survived worse than German bombs, and they’ll survive this too. It should be reassuring, maybe, but London is too far from American soil for Bucky to find the idea very comforting.

“Are you sure you want to follow me?” Steve asks.

Bucky slings an arm around his broad shoulders, and tries to shake off the unsettling sensation that Steve is taller and stronger than him. He isn’t sure that he’ll ever get used to it.

“If I don’t stick around, who’s gonna keep you from doing something stupid?”

Steve looks like a stranger these days, but at least the way he smiles at Bucky is the same: soft, fond, and a little bit smitten.

_He still wants me._ It used to bother Bucky, that the friend he considered a brother didn’t see him the same way. He’s never thought any less of Steve for being a queer—half-a-queer?—but he also wasn’t quite comfortable with being the object of his affection.

Now Bucky couldn’t care less _how_ Steve loves him, as long as it means that Steve loves him _most_.

“Like you’ve ever been able to stop me,” Steve says.

“Yeah right.” Bucky pulls him closer, and he can’t quite ignore how odd it feels that he has to reach _up_ to ruffle Steve’s hair. “I just let you think you call the shots, punk.”

“You will address me as ‘captain’ or ‘sir,’” Steve says, laughing.

Bucky laughs too. “You can kiss my ass. Captain.”

It feels so good to hold Steve close, bickering and name-calling like they’re boys again, and Bucky wants to hang onto this moment forever.

Steve ducks out of his embrace, voice serious when he says, “You’ve got more right than anybody to make Hydra pay, but if you choose to go home, I would never blame you. You know that, right?”

Bucky hurries ahead, leaving Steve to trail along in his wake. This, at least, is familiar.

Colonel Phillips said he could be honorably discharged, and God knows Bucky wants to take him up on that offer. But if he’s learned anything since he left America, it’s that home isn’t New York so much as it is whichever place Steve Rogers happens to be—and Steve will stay here until the war is won.

“I’ve already told you twice: I’m not going back. Not yet,” Bucky says. “I’m starting to think you ain’t listening.”

“All right, Buck. I hear you.”

Steve clasps his shoulder, and his grip is warm, grounding. Strong and protective in a way that Bucky isn’t used to, and he finds himself wanting to lean into it. To hold fast to Steve until this war is over. Until they can go back to Brooklyn, together.

.

.

Last year, after Bucky opened the letter that changed his life, he hid the Army’s summons under his mattress and pretended it never existed. Spun a story to his family about enlisting because it was the right thing to do. It doesn’t matter that it _is_ the right thing, that he’s serving regardless of the cause; a lie is a lie. He let Steve collect a half-dozen 4F stamps without ever coming clean. And when the time came to ship out, Bucky wore his neat uniform with all the arrogance of a man who had chosen his own fate.

It was bullshit, and there’s no way to keep that secret anymore. Bucky was rattling off his service number the night Steve rescued him from the Kreischberg factory, and he knows as well as any other captain that a “3” designates a drafted soldier.

The Steve he grew up with would have said something about it by now, but he’s changed, they’ve both changed, and now they skirt around the truth.

(The lies that Bucky has told today, in no particular order: he volunteered for the Army, and he’s happy to serve his country; no, he isn’t homesick; yes, he thinks British dames are much prettier than American girls; and he’s fine, just fine, thank you.)

Steve knows he’s a liar, knows what a coward he is. How could he not, after finding him strapped down to that table like a fucking animal? After smelling his uniform, rank with sweat and piss?

Bucky couldn’t stand it if that’s all Steve ever saw of him as a soldier. Some helpless, broken thing in need of rescue. The way that, in his most shameful moments, Bucky sometimes looked at him.

.

.

Steve tells Colonel Phillips that Bucky is going to be his second-in-command, and within a day he has a visitor: Agent Carter. She’s dressed in her spotless uniform, dark curls styled to perfection, beautiful lips stained red.

Bucky nods. “Ma’am.”

She’s too smart to miss the mockery in his voice, but instead of reprimanding him, she says, “Might I have a word, Sergeant?”

Bucky opens his door wider. “You can have as many words as you like, Agent Carter.”

Actual officers keep quarters on base, but the S.S.R. has stowed away half-relevant grunts like Bucky in a ramshackle hotel. It’s still nicer than anywhere he ever lived in Brooklyn, even though his room is tiny, threadbare, and already wrecked.

Carter steps over an empty liquor bottle, looking vaguely unimpressed. If Bucky has ever met a woman who could exude disdain like Peggy Carter, he can’t recall it.

“Looks like you had quite a night,” she says mildly.

“Not really.” Bucky drank half a gallon of whiskey, just to see if he could still get drunk, but he never felt a drop of it. One more disappointment he can thank Zola’s serum for. He can’t sleep without nightmares, can’t drink to escape, can’t even stand to be touched by anyone besides Steve.

He doesn’t invite Carter to sit down, because the sooner she leaves him alone, the happier he’ll be.

“I’ll get right to the point,” she says. “Colonel Phillips told me that you refused an honorable discharge, and you’re joining Captain Rogers’s team.”

Bucky puts his hands in his pockets. “And?”

Carter shrugs. Somehow she manages to make even that casual gesture look rigid. “And it surprised me. You were captured, imprisoned, and tortured. After an ordeal like that, most men would jump at the chance to go home.”

“If you’re here to talk me out of it, you’re wasting your time,” Bucky says. “Steve already tried.”

He expects her to take issue with such blatant disrespect, but Carter only laughs. She’s gorgeous even when she scowls, but her smile is breathtaking. No wonder she has Steve wrapped around her little finger.

Steve and Peggy’s interest in each other should be a burden lifted, but Bucky can’t quite find the same relief in it that he once would have.

“You misunderstand me,” Carter says. “I don’t intend to discourage you. I think your choice is very brave, and frankly, I’m thankful that Steve will have someone like you looking out for him.”

“Someone like me?” Bucky asks. He thinks of Zola’s table, and the draft notice he stuffed under his mattress. “How do you have any idea what I’m like? We barely know each other.”

“You didn’t sign up for this fight, and you’re still following your friend into hell,” Carter says. Her dark eyes are sharp and shrewd, much too keen for Bucky’s liking. “That tells me everything I need to know.”

He can’t figure out how to answer that, and he’s still struggling for the right words when she says, “I only wanted to wish you well. Good day, Sergeant Barnes.”

Bucky has been trying his damnedest to hate Agent Carter, but she’s making it very hard.

.

.

Captain America’s team leaves for Germany the day after tomorrow, and Bucky can’t sleep. In forty-eight hours, he’ll be back in the thick of this war, seeking out bases like the one where he was held. He could die, or worse, end up captured again. Trapped and restrained, used like a lab rat to further Hydra’s cause.

By three o’clock in the morning, Bucky gives up on getting any rest, so he changes into his wrinkled uniform and walks to S.S.R. headquarters.

At the gate, a middle-aged sergeant frowns at him and says, “It’s 0300 hours. What business do you have here?”

Bucky stands up straighter. “I want to see Captain Rogers.”

“And I want to have dinner with my wife in Kansas,” says the sergeant. “We don’t always get what we want. Go back to your quarters.”

Bucky doesn’t have the patience for this shit. Not tonight. “Look, I need to talk strategy with Captain America. So unless you’d like to have two hundred pounds of pissed off supersoldier kicking your ass, maybe just let me through. All right, pal?”

The sergeant mutters something about reporting him to Colonel Phillips, but he gets out of Bucky’s way just the same.

Most of Headquarters is underground, and he has to go down four flights of stairs before he reaches the residential wing that houses Steve’s room. There are a half-dozen American N.C.O.s on guard throughout the building, and even more low-ranking British officers, but none of them gives him any trouble.

Steve neglected to lock his door, so Bucky lets himself inside.

He doesn’t even have time to say hello before he’s pinned against the wall. The darkness runs too deep to see through, but Bucky knows what the clasp of Steve’s hands feels like on his shoulders, even if his strength is foreign.

“Hey! It’s just me.”

Steve’s grip falters, then falls away. “Bucky?”

He snorts. “Who else would be bothering you at three in the morning?”

_Probably Agent Carter._ A year ago, he would’ve been happy for Steve to find a girl, perhaps even relieved. But Bucky only feels resentful, and he doesn’t want to examine his own bitterness too closely.

There’s the click of a lamp switch, and dull, orange light fills the room.

He’s seen Steve plenty of times since Kreischberg, but not like this, shirtless and sleep-tousled. He crosses his arms over his bare chest, and somehow, with the power of that strong body on display, Bucky can finally spot Captain America’s weaknesses. There’s shame written along the lines of his hunched shoulders and bowed head, as familiar as the green in his blue eyes. Of all the things that could have stayed the same, he wishes it hadn’t been Steve’s insecurities.

He doesn’t look up when he asks, “What are you doing here, Bucky?”

“I can’t sleep.” That isn’t much of an answer, but it’s the only one he has to give.

Steve rummages through his dresser, then turns away to pull a white t-shirt over his head.

“Why’re you so bashful?” Bucky asks. “It’s nothing I didn’t see back in Brooklyn.”

Steve gives him a wary, injured look, like he can’t figure out whether or not he’s being made fun of. “Don’t act like I haven’t changed,” he whispers. “We both know that’s not true.”

“You’re so damn dramatic.” Bucky strides forward and puts his hand on Steve’s chest. “This body might be Army-issued, but it’s still yours. Don’t ever forget that.”

The heart beneath his palm beats slowly, steadily; nothing like the fragile, irregular rhythm that Steve lived with for twenty-five years. As difficult as his transformation is for Bucky to accept, he understands that Abraham Erskine saved Steve from an early, overlooked grave, and he’s never been more thankful for anything.

“Are you all right, Buck?”

_Don’t do that_ , he wants to say. _Don’t treat me like I need help._

He’s already useless. Too twisted by Hydra’s experiments and too broken by this war to be any kind of good man. Worse, Bucky has built his life around looking out for Steve, and there’s no one who needs protection less than Captain America.

“I’m fine,” he says.

Steve’s chest is fever-hot beneath his hand, and for a moment Bucky wishes that he’d wrap those solid arms around him. It would feel so safe, he thinks. Secure, like nothing else has since Zola’s table.

All he has to do is say something. Steve’s desire is no secret. Everything he wants shows plainly on his face, and if Bucky gives in, gives up—if he asks to be touched—he’s sure that Steve would make it good for him.

He stumbles backward, turns away. The room seems too small, and his stomach drops, heavy and sickened. He’s always been greedy, thoughtless, but Bucky has never let selfishness drive him so low before. What kind of man would exploit his best friend’s love just to steal a little comfort for himself?

“I’ve gotta go, gotta sleep if I can,” Bucky says. “Sorry I bothered you, Captain. Won’t happen again.”

He’s already out the door before Steve can say more than his name.

.

.

MI6 operatives confirm that there’s a Hydra base in western Poland, right along the German border, nested in the midst of several Nazi camps.

Bucky knows what happens at those camps. He’s known since _The New York Times_ printed an article, buried on page 7, about the annihilation of European Jews.

And sometimes, when Zola felt talkative, he’d tell Bucky about Buchenwald, the camp where he created equipment to facilitate medical experiments. Schmidt had been impressed with his work and recruited him within a year. But before he’d joined Hydra, Zola had built chambers to freeze and thaw prisoners, testing the human body’s endurance in extreme cold.

_Gypsies and Jews were the most compliant subjects_. _Are you going to be compliant, Sergeant Barnes?_

Bucky had resisted at first, but Zola pumped him full of drugs, some to transform him into a better soldier, some to keep him placid and confused. After enough needles, and beatings, and stories about dead, docile Jews, the fight had gone out of him. No one rescued the victims at Buchenwald, and no one would rescue him either.

Except, Steve did. Steve appeared, as brave and impossible as a prince right out of a fairy tale, to save him.

The night before they set out for Poland, Steve says, “You know, if you want new dog tags, they wouldn’t be hard to get.”

Tags without an _H_ on them, he means. Tags that don’t paint a target on his back in Nazi territory.

It’s a little late for that, though, so Bucky shakes his head. “No. I’m keeping these.”

Maybe he’s just being stubborn, but can’t bear to wear any tags besides the ones that saw him through Kreischberg. He thinks of his father, who wasn’t proud of much. Yet he’d been proud to be Jewish, and it’s taken a long time for Bucky to be proud too. He isn’t about to let Hydra take that pride from him on top of everything else.

.

.

Winter in Poland is far crueler than winter in Brooklyn, and the team complains about it constantly. Falsworth, Gabe, Morita, Dernier, Dum Dum: they all shiver and bitch, blue-lipped, about the cold. Just so he doesn’t stand out, Bucky cusses Polish weather in his most colorful language, but the truth is, he barely feels it.

It’s not much of a surprise. He’s stronger, faster, hardier than he’s ever been. Bucky’s excellent aim made him a sniper, but he’s different now. No matter how tricky the target is, he never misses. No matter how little sleep he gets, his body rarely tires. Bucky is hungry all the time, but if he eats as voraciously as he wants to, then someone might notice that he isn’t quite right.

He’s almost like Steve. Except that Erskine’s formula amplified the goodness in Steve, and whatever Zola did unearthed the bad in Bucky, brought it to the surface and made it worse.

On the third day of the mission, as they’re scouting the terrain around a Hydra base, Bucky spots a black-clad agent. He’s perched in a tree, as unobtrusive and well-balanced as a sparrow, maybe a thousand yards away. Before Kreischberg, Bucky would never have made a shot like this, but now he can. Now he will. He aims, breathes, and pulls the trigger. The agent falls, dead before Bucky even notices the rifle’s recoil against his shoulder.

Later, their team makes camp in an abandoned school. Everything’s been burned, the roof is falling in, and vines crawl up the blackened bricks, strangling the walls that hold up this forgotten house of learning. Bucky can see stars through a hole in the ceiling, bright points against the black of night. The sun should be setting on New York right now, and he wonders if his mother could be looking at the sky too. Doing the same thing Bucky’s doing, half a world away. It’s an oddly comforting thought.

He grips his dog tags and runs his fingers over the familiar grooves of his service number. _32557038._ That’s his, as much as anything can be these days.

.

.


	4. SECOND MOVEMENT: but more important, the man

.

.

**SECOND MOVEMENT: but more important, the man**

_It isn’t a lover he wants. It’s a mirror so forgiving that it will reflect his broken image back at him whole._

**{1944}**

.

.

After they liberate Allied prisoners from the weapons factory, Dernier blows the place sky high, and Bucky smiles as he watches it burn. Zola wasn’t there, but for a moment, he pretends the good doctor might be trapped inside. Tied down to a table, caught in an inferno.

That night, he’s just one P.O.W. in a camp of hundreds. Most of them will be heading home, back to their families and sweethearts. Honorably discharged, like Bucky could have been, if he had a thimbleful of sense.

There’s one boy—British, milk pale and freckled, so young that Bucky thinks he must have lied about his age to enlist—who sits before the campfire, blank-faced. He looks like a porcelain doll: fragile, perfectly still on the outside, and empty within.

Bucky turns away, because all he can see is his father, frozen in a kitchen corner chair, wearing that same dead expression.

Dum Dum claps him on the shoulder and asks, “You okay, Sarge?”

He makes himself smile. “Why wouldn’t I be? We just blew one of Schmidt’s hellholes to kingdom come. I say it’s time to celebrate.”

“That’s the spirit!” Dum Dum says, laughing. “We ought to make Cap sing that ditty he’s so famous for.”

“Good luck with that,” Bucky says, and now he’s grinning for real instead of for show. “Of course, we could always sing it for him.”

Five minutes later, all six of them are serenading Steve and four hundred soldiers. Dernier is half-drunk, Morita doesn’t know most of the lyrics, Dum Dum couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, and Bucky can’t stop sniggering. It’s got to be the worst rendition of _Star Spangled Man with a Plan_ that’s ever been sung, but the men love it. Steve’s cheeks turn bright red, his broad shoulders shaking with laughter. He looks embarrassed and happy and so goddamn beautiful—

Bucky grabs his arm and drags him forward. “Help us out!”

Steve stares at him. There’s so much affection in his gaze that Bucky can barely catch his breath, and it helps him believe, for a moment, that he’s still the man Steve has always loved.

_Who’ll hang a noose on the goose-stepping goons from Berlin?_

_Who will redeem, heed the call for America?_

_Who’ll rise or fall, give his all for America?_

_Who’s here to prove that we can?_

_The Star Spangled Man with a Plan!_

They carry on for fifteen minutes, because the men demand three encores, and Bucky discovers that the supersoldier serum did nothing to aid Steve’s awful singing. It’s a relief, knowing that some flaws survived his transformation.

After they’ve settled down, eaten what rations they had, and made their beds on the cold ground, Bucky says, “I guess you’re still tone deaf.”

Steve nudges him with his elbow. “I guess you’re still a jerk.”

“Punk.” It’s a reflexive insult, if one that doesn’t fit Steve quite so well these days, now that he’s the size of a tank.

Bucky doesn’t mean to ask, but the question has been burning in the back of his mind for weeks, and he can’t hold it in any longer. “You still a virgin, Stevie?”

He sputters and says something that might be Bucky’s name.

“Didn’t mean to ambush you. I’m just curious, you know?” Bucky keeps his voice quiet but light, teasing, like the answer doesn’t matter much to him.

When Steve stays silent, he tries again. “Aww, c’mon. I told you all about getting under Lily Marie’s skirt. It’s not fair if you don’t return the favor.”

“Her name was Lily May,” Steve says. “And I didn’t ask to hear about her. I didn’t ask to hear about any of the dames you made time with, but you sure as hell told me, whether I liked it or not.”

Steve is right, of course. Bucky never failed to brag about the girls he fucked, or kissed, or simply took dancing. Just to make sure Steve knew where he stood: that he was interested in girls, and only girls; that fellas were fine for friends, but nothing more.

Maybe he also did it to make Steve jealous. Because even if he didn’t have any interest in going to bed with a man, some part of Bucky still enjoyed the attention. He’s always liked being the center of Steve’s universe. Preened under the blanket of his well-worn love, fed on it when he felt starved of real affection.

“That was mean of me,” Bucky says. “Selfish. I shouldn’t have hurt you like that.”

It’s the first time in years that he’s acknowledged the direction of Steve’s desires, and Bucky isn’t even sure why he says it.

Steve makes a weak noise. “Bucky. I didn’t mean to—I’m sorry.”

He sounds so ashamed. Steve has never backed down from a fight, has always faced bullies with unassailable pride, and now he’s shrinking away, anxious and apologetic.

“Shut your yap,” Bucky says, because he can’t bear to hear the fear he put in his best friend’s voice. “If you’re not gonna tell me whether you got laid, at least let me catch some sleep.”

They lie side-by-side in hushed darkness for so long that it startles Bucky when Steve speaks up. “There was a girl in Atlanta,” he says, so softly that his voice could disappear on the wind. “Ellie. She was beautiful, sweet too. A real catch. Anyway, she asked me to sign a picture after the show. It was hard for me to believe that a dame like that would look twice at me, but she did.”

The air tastes too thin now, and Bucky has to breathe deeper, but he still feels suffocated.

“We got a couple of drinks together, went back to her place. You can probably guess the rest.”

He sure can. “Was it good?” Bucky asks.

“Yeah. I remembered all you said about paying attention to a girl. So I took care of her before we—” Steve falls quiet again, then says, “I hope she wasn’t disappointed. I didn’t last very long.”

Bucky can’t risk glancing at Steve when he says, “Any girl who’d be disappointed in you is a damn idiot.”

Steve snorts. “Then I guess half the women in Brooklyn are idiots, huh?”

“Well that was before—” Bucky stops, and wishes he could snatch his own words out of the air. That didn’t come out right at all.

Steve draws in a ragged breath. “I know. A year ago, Ellie wouldn’t have given me the time of day. Nobody except for Dr. Erskine, and maybe Peggy, saw me as much of a man before the serum. Not even you.”

“That’s horseshit,” Bucky says. He turns over, facing Steve for the first time tonight. “You’ve always been stronger than anyone I know, ready to stand up for people who needed help, too brave for your own damn good. If all that doesn’t make a man, what does?”

“Sure,” Steve says. He stares up at the stars, flat on his back, refusing to look at Bucky. “If you say so.”

He punches Steve on the shoulder, hard enough to make him flinch and ask, “What the hell?”

Bucky grips Steve’s arm, holding on tighter than he should. “When, in twenty-six years of friendship, did I ever make you feel small? You name me one moment when I did that.”

Steve scowls, and even with the shape of his face all wrong, that expression hasn’t changed one bit. “Every time you treated me like a little brother. Somebody you had to rescue, take care of, play nursemaid for.”

He trembles under Bucky’s hand when he whispers, “That morning, the week before Pearl Harbor, after you—after we... that made me feel about two inches tall.”

Bucky glances around. They’re set apart from the rest of the soldiers, and anybody who’s not on watch is asleep, but he can’t shake the feeling that someone could be listening. “We can’t—”

Steve speaks right over Bucky, voice pitched too low for eavesdroppers to hear. He talks faster, as if he has to rush through this confession or he won’t finish it at all. “I used to think you could only like girls, but I’m not so sure anymore. Sometimes you look at me the way I’ve always looked at you, and I’m not gonna lie, it hurts my pride that it took a miracle to make that happen. But mostly I just—I want you too much to care.”

For half their lives, Bucky has known how Steve felt, and they’ve only talked about it once. Never again acknowledged this desire that’s grown up between them, as impossible to uproot as a stubborn weed.

He should say something. A denial, an agreement, a promise. Anything would be better than nothing, but Bucky doesn’t know how to put words to a secret that, except for one cold December morning four years ago, has only existed in silence.

.

.

By the time they return to headquarters, the S.S.R. personnel no longer calls their squad Strike Team Alpha. News of their ear-splitting rendition of _Star Spangled Man with a Plan_ traveled all the way back to London, and when Agent Carter heard about it, she dubbed them the Howling Commandos.

Bucky might as well be on another planet during their debriefing with Colonel Phillips. Every time he looks at Steve—immaculate and picture-star handsome in his dress uniform—he thinks of that night in Poland. What Steve admitted as they lay next to each other on the frozen, foreign ground.

After the debriefing, Bucky heads straight to the nearest pub. Drinking won’t do much for him, but there’s more than one way to forget.

He spots Helen Lorraine at the bar. She’s blonde, slender, pretty in a pointed way. Back in New York, her looks alone would have been enough to interest Bucky, but that isn’t what catches his attention tonight. Helen bragged to everyone who might listen about the kiss she laid on Captain America, and she hasn’t made any secret of her intentions toward Steve.

Bucky is tired of being looked over, when he used to be the one everybody looked _at_ , and he means to do something about it.

He leans against the bar, a fraction too close to Helen to be gentlemanly, and says, “It’s criminal for a girl as gorgeous as you to buy her own drink.”

Her lips curve into a sly smile. “You don’t have to lay it on that thick.”

Helen has a mouth made for smirking, and he can tell from the way she holds herself that she’s confident in her beauty.

Bucky smiles back; he knows the value of his own good looks too. That was enough to get him under plenty of Brooklyn girls’ skirts, so why should things be any different in London?

They haven’t been talking for five minutes when Helen asks, “Where’s your captain tonight?”

He swallows down a rude answer, shrugs, and says, “Got no idea. I’m not his keeper.”

“That isn’t how I heard it.” Helen plucks a maraschino cherry out of her red cocktail and pops it into her mouth.

He wants to ask what kind of gossip is circulating about him and Steve, but instead Bucky says, “Let’s not talk about my C.O.”

Flirting used to be a game he excelled at. A give-and-take of compliments and teasing that he understood naturally, but it doesn’t come with such ease anymore. Every joke he makes sounds harsh or stilted.

When Helen tries to brush his hair away from his eyes, Bucky panics and grabs her wrist too hard. Not on purpose, but he hasn’t learned his new strength yet, and being touched without warning sets him off these days.

“Sorry,” he says. “Didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Helen won’t meet his eyes as she rubs her wrist. “It’s all right, but I expect you to make it up to me.”

“Of course. Anything you want, doll.”

It turns out that all Helen wants is Steve. She says she’ll be forever grateful if he helps her get a moment alone with Captain Rogers. Bucky finishes his whiskey, wishing it did a damn thing to ease the ache in his chest. This must be how Steve felt every time a dame flirted with him just to make Bucky jealous.

He pays for Helen’s drink, like he promised, and says, “Goodnight, Private Lorraine.”

It’s probably for the best. If he couldn’t handle a gentle touch to his forehead, how in the hell could he have fucked her?

Bucky stops halfway back to headquarters, leans against a wall, and breathes. He barely feels the cold, but winter wind pricks at his skin.

_Needles pierce his naked body, exposed for Zola’s scrutiny, and the pain makes him sob and scream. Blue serum burns him from the inside out, the fire in his veins blindingly bright, consuming everything._

Bucky punches the brick wall until his stinging knuckles ground him. The Kreischberg factory is a smoking rubble, thanks to Steve. It’s over, he’s safe, and Zola will never touch him again—but if that’s true, then why is it so hard to believe?

He hurries back to base. The Commandos have their own quarters now, a perk of being Captain America’s men, but Bucky goes to Steve’s room.

It feels as if his skin can’t contain the power that Zola forced on him, into him. Like this frantic energy is tearing him apart, and without someone to hold him together, he’ll shatter.

Bucky finds Steve awake, sitting at his desk, wearing his perfectly pressed uniform. A worry line creases the space between his eyebrows when he asks, “Are you okay, Buck?”

He grabs Steve by the lapels of his jacket, pulls him to his feet, and crowds him against the desk. It feels backwards to unknot a tie that isn’t his own, and there are too many brass buttons between his hands and Steve’s skin.

“What are you doing?” Steve asks. He catches Bucky’s wrists, but his grip is cautious, feeble. Steve’s going easy on him, pulling his punches, and it’s galling to taste his own medicine this way, to be the fragile one now.

“Stop treating me like I’m weak,” Bucky says.

That gets Steve to scowl and stand up straighter. Maybe he’d like to loom over Bucky the way Bucky once loomed over him, but there’s only an inch difference in their heights, so he doesn’t quite manage it.

“I won’t take orders from you,” Steve says.

“The hell you won’t.”

Bucky unfastens his belt and trousers, and even though he’s shaking, his hands remain steady. That was the first thing he learned on the front lines: he couldn’t shoot straight if he let the fear reach his hands.

Steve blushes, but if he’s embarrassed, it doesn’t stop him from staring, gaze gentle and mouth soft, as Bucky pushes his underwear down his hips.

Steve sounds half-strangled when he asks, “Don’t you think this is moving awful fast?”

Bucky grabs Steve’s shoulders and pushes him to his knees. He put up more of a fight than this when he was nothing but ninety pounds of stubborn principles, and Bucky knows that if Steve wasn’t interested, he’d say so.

Still, he has to be sure, so he asks, “This okay?”

Steve looks up, and the whole world might as well be in his eyes, for all that Bucky cares about anything else. His cheeks flush darker, from pink to scalding red, but he nods and says, “I wanna make you feel good.”

The best pieces of them are unraveling right in his hands, and Bucky should put a stop to this, but he can’t.

He threads his fingers through Steve’s soft hair, tugging him closer. “Then get to work, darlin’.”

For the first time since they were kids, Steve does as he’s told. Bucky doesn’t have time to marvel at that, because Steve nuzzles his thigh and presses a kiss to his hipbone. Then he closes his mouth around Bucky’s cock and starts to suck, sloppy as a virgin, but with the enthusiasm of a good-time girl.

He hasn’t gotten laid since he shipped out, and he’s missed being touched this way. Anything that broke through his loneliness would be a relief, but what’s really getting him off is that it’s Steve doing this. Proud, hard-headed Steve, who never surrenders to anyone, is kneeling on a concrete floor, allowing Bucky to fuck his mouth. And he’s happy to do it, if the blissful expression on his face can be trusted.

Bucky never wants to stop, but he knows this won’t be enough to make him come. Right now he feels too vulnerable, and if he’s going to finish, he needs something different.

(He remembers Zola examining his naked body, like he was dead already, some cadaver set aside for study; how powerless he felt under the doctor’s childlike hands.)

Bucky pushes Steve away more violently than he means to, and he looks up with wide, hurt eyes.

Steve stumbles to his feet, wipes at his swollen lips with the back of his hand, and asks, “Did I do something wrong?”

He hates that expression on Steve’s face, the one he wears when he thinks he’s unworthy.

“You got a mouth made for that,” Bucky says. “It just isn’t what I need right now.”

He turns Steve around, bites the nape of his neck, and says, “Bend over your desk.”

Steve takes a ragged breath. He doesn’t protest, but he doesn’t jump to follow instructions either.

“I know you want to. You haven’t exactly been subtle about it, pal.” Bucky grabs Steve by the hips and whispers, “Every time I came home from a date, you’d act jealous as hell and get this look. Like you were just dying to open your legs for me.”

A shudder runs down the length of Steve’s straightened-out spine. He must enjoy being embarrassed this way, because he unbuckles his belt and pushes down his pants. Then he bends over the desk, like he was told to.

Bucky reaches around to grasp Steve’s cock. “Guess you didn’t change everywhere. Always were big for a little guy.”

Steve moans, shudders, and starts thrusting into his hand, but something about that, giving pleasure only for the sake of giving it, is too much. It feels real in a way Bucky can’t take, so he lets go. Then he sucks on two fingers, slides them between Steve’s legs, and presses into him. He’s tight and hot, but not wet like a girl, of course. Bucky tells himself it doesn’t matter. A hole is a hole, and it’ll feel enough like fucking a woman that he won’t have to think about the difference.

Steve arches back against him, trembling all over. He loosens up after a few minutes of being worked by Bucky’s fingers, and that’s going to have to do, because if he keeps listening to Steve’s choked-off cries he’ll come too soon.

Bucky stops, digs a condom and a tube of lubricant from his pocket. He’d intended to use them with Private Lorraine, and he thinks, with no small amount of spite, that he’s getting even and then some by fucking Steve instead.

“Do I need to use a rubber with you?” Bucky asks. “Or did that fancy serum make you immune to the clap too?”

Steve laughs, but his voice comes out quiet and almost shy when he says, “You don’t have to wear one. I can’t get sick anymore.”

It’s a beautiful thing to hear, that Steve will never suffer from pneumonia or scarlet fever again, but Bucky wishes he hadn’t asked. Now he’s thinking about the sickly boy he protected back in Brooklyn, the boy he considered family, and the guilt that underlies his need threatens to make his stomach turn.

_What the hell am I doing?_

Bucky had a hundred opportunities to do this back in Brooklyn—God knows Steve gave him plenty—but he never wanted to. Some part of him still doesn’t want to, but it’s buried beneath too much loneliness to find.

Steve says, “C’mon, hurry up—”

“Shut up,” Bucky says. “Let me catch my breath.”

Steve looks over his shoulder and asks, “You gonna stand there all night or put it in me?”

There’s a beat of silence and heat, stilling the air between them. Then Bucky says, “You mouthy fucking punk.” He tosses the rubber aside, slicks up his cock, and holds Steve’s hip while he pushes inside of him.

He was wrong; this isn’t anything like being with a woman. Bucky can smell cologne and sweat, see the breadth of Steve’s powerful shoulders rocking with every thrust, hear the low pitch of his deep-throated moans. Even with the lubricant, there’s not quite enough wetness to ease the friction where they’re joined, but if Steve minds, he sure isn’t showing it.

“God, you give it up easy.” He fucks Steve harder, so roughly that the desk wobbles on its spindly legs. “Just for me, huh?”

Steve starts making wounded, hitched noises every time their bodies come together. Soft little whimpers, so quiet that it takes Bucky a moment to consider that they might not be sounds of pleasure.

“You all right?” he asks.

Steve nods, his voice frantic and feverish when he says, “Don’t stop! You feel so good—”

This is better than any fuck Bucky’s ever had, and it’s got nothing to do with the tight, eager heat of the body beneath him. It’s because Steve keeps sobbing his name, begging for more, saying, “I love you, I love you, I—God, I love you, Buck—”

He buries his face against Steve’s shoulder to muffle his shout as he comes. It’s overwhelming, pleasure too pure to think through, exactly what he’s been wanting most: to lose himself.

.

.

They clean up at the wash basin and fix their clothes, moving around each other shyly, awkward as teenagers sharing their first dance. Bucky steals a glance at Steve, then wishes he hadn’t. His hair is a mess, red mouth swollen, cheeks streaked with tear tracks. Steve’s hands shake as he buckles his belt, and he wobbles when he walks. He looks beautiful, dazed, and so well-fucked that it sends twin thrills of pride and regret through Bucky.

He can see Steve gearing up to say something serious. Before he has the chance, Bucky gives him a playful shove. “Thanks, pal. I really needed that.”

Steve rubs at his arm, frowning. “You don’t have to thank me. I liked it too.”

“Yeah, I picked up on that,” Bucky says.

He slings an arm around Steve’s shoulders, and then he’s hit with an unpleasant lurch of deja vu. They touched this way a thousand times before the war turned their lives upside down. Things used to be so much simpler, when Steve was only his friend, the kid brother he never had. Now there’s a love bite on Steve’s throat, shaped by Bucky’s greedy mouth, pink and raw-looking. They smell like the cloying musk that lingers after sex, their skin slick with each other’s sweat. Steve can probably feel Bucky’s come leaking out of him, and there’s nothing friendly about any of this.

He feels like he might be sick.

Steve cups Bucky’s cheeks between his hands, and says, “It’s okay.”

Bucky tries to turn his face away, but he only ends up leaning into Steve’s palm. “No, it’s not. _I’m_ not okay.”

Steve tilts his head to the side, angling lower, so that his eyes are level with Bucky’s. “What do you mean?”

He’s tired of lying, and it all comes tumbling out, the secrets Bucky has tried so hard to bury.

“I’m afraid to sleep,” he says. “I dream about the factory, and Zola, and what he did to me. I feel like he killed me—the me I used to be—and now I’m just some shell walking around with Bucky Barnes’s face, but there’s nothing inside.”

Steve strokes his cheek and says, “You’re still you, Bucky. Hydra couldn’t take that away.”

He’s spent weeks hiding how this war has changed him, but now that he’s coming clean, Bucky needs Steve to believe him. To understand.

He pulls back, putting some space between them. “I’m not the same anymore.”

Steve gestures at his body. “And I am?”

“Please. On the inside, you’re the person you’ve always been,” Bucky says. “Only now you’ve got a body that can keep up with all your stupid.”

That teases a smile out of Steve, at least.

Bucky ducks his head. “Zola said he’d make the perfect soldier out of me. And maybe he did, but he took something from me too. What does it matter if I’m a good soldier when I’m not a decent man anymore?”

Something in that must spook Steve, because he recoils. “That’s not true,” he says.

It is, though. Bucky doesn’t care about doing the right thing. Fighting for peace or justice or any of that shit. He just wants to take down Hydra, burn their factories to the ground and go home. When he kills one of their soldiers, that’s all he sees: another dead Nazi, shortening the distance between himself and Brooklyn.

Bucky should say that, but it stands against everything Steve believes, everything he _is_. He couldn’t bear it if Steve ever saw him for the hateful, bitter thing he’s become, and his courage to tell the truth curdles.

“Maybe you’re right,” Bucky says. “It’s probably all in my head.”

.

.


	5. THIRD MOVEMENT: whatever happens tomorrow

.

.

**THIRD MOVEMENT: whatever happens tomorrow**

_He survives the bullet only to be killed one piece at a time, picked apart until his bones are scraped clean. Instead of swallowing him down, this war eats him alive by inches._

**{1944}**

.

.

_Shell-shocked._ That’s what the neighbors always said about his father. _George Barnes left his wits in the trenches, poor fella. Shell-shocked like you ain’t ever seen._

Bucky hated his dad for hiding from the world. Spending half his days in bed, or glued to his favorite chair, so still he could have been a statue. He never held a job for long, and that meant Ma had to work overtime at the textile factory just to keep six mouths fed. Then the stock market crashed, and even his mother couldn’t work eighty-hour weeks, so Bucky dropped out of seventh grade to make ends meet. He was hauling crates at the docks by the spring of ’31, ten hours of backbreaking labor every day, while his father lost job after job. Fired for panicking on an assembly line, for screaming at a rude customer, for punching a supervisor who startled him.

Bucky remembers coming home from a double shift, too sore to lift his arms, so exhausted he wanted to cry. Dad asked if he was all right, if he needed anything.

_I need you to be a man and take care of us_ , he’d said.

These days, Bucky knows more about shell-shock than he’d like to. His mind is a war zone, so dangerous and unpredictable that he might as well be on the front lines. Some nights he wakes panicked and terrified, skin crawling with the shadow of Zola’s hands. Needles piercing him all over, turning him inside out, tearing him apart. Other times, Bucky’s fury swallows his fear, and he uses it against Hydra’s agents. It’s easy to pick them off from a distance, to shoot Schmidt’s men like fish in a barrel, but close combat is more satisfying. It doesn’t matter who they are, where they’re from, that they might have family back home; to Bucky, every enemy soldier is Zola.

Sometimes he thinks about the blood on his hands, and it disturbs him, how little remorse he feels.

Bucky wants to go home, but he can’t imagine his mother seeing him this way. He wonders if that’s why his father killed himself: because he couldn’t keep living with the shame of his own weakness. Dad put a bullet through his brain while his family was at church, and that isn’t the sort of thing a man does without reason.

On sleepless nights, Bucky runs his fingers over his pistol, testing the sharp edges and smooth curves. The only hope he can find these days is buried in its magazine.

.

.

Between missions, he and Steve sneak off to cheap hotels, bombed-out ruins, even the hay loft of a deserted farm. They fuck, quickly and quietly, grasping stolen moments wherever they can.

On their last night in Prague, Bucky pins Steve to the floor of an abandoned building and rides him. Sometimes he wants it like this, Steve inside of him instead of the other way around, so long as he still calls the shots.

A storm rages outside, splitting the sky with purple lightning, and Bucky is thankful for it. Thunder drowns out every sound they make, so they can be as loud as they want. Steve’s hands are bruising his waist, his brow furrowed, those strong hips of his barely thrusting up. He has to work hard to be gentle, and it might be funny if Steve’s restraint wasn’t driving him crazy.

Bucky rocks faster, taking more since Steve won’t give it to him. It hurts, but each sharp ache sends a jolt of heat down his legs, up his spine. And it’s good, it’s exactly what he needs, a riot of slick flesh meeting, drawing away, meeting again. Their breath steams, each moan clouding in the cold spring air.

Steve looks up at him, mouth rounded on a soft cry, his eyes bright, besotted. He doesn’t have to say the words; his love is written all over his face. Guilt claws up Bucky’s throat, raw and suffocating, even as he comes.

He pulls away as soon as he can feel his legs, then wipes his hand across the ground, rubbing away his come on the cracked cement floor. Bucky lies on his back and covers his face with his arm, trying not to listen to Steve jerk off beside him. He finishes in less than a minute, crying out so loudly that Bucky can hear it even over the storm.

This is the worst part. Lying beside Steve once the sex is over, naked and weak in the knees. Bucky can still feel the slick mess inside of him, the uncomfortable emptiness between his legs.

Steve might look like a god these days, but under that miracle of a body he’s still the dumb kid Bucky grew up protecting, looking out for, taking care of. A few months of fucking can’t erase twenty-five years of brotherhood, and regret always sets in once Bucky is spent. There’s a sense of wrongness he can’t shake, a deep-seated disgust with what they’re doing that lives all the way down in his bones.

The silence between them stretches too thin, so strained that Bucky can’t take it. He climbs to his feet, pulls on his pants, fixes his unbuttoned shirt.

“Don’t go.” Steve sits up, scrambling to fix his own clothes. “Let’s just stay here for awhile, okay?”

He can’t refuse. Steve never asks for much, and he deserves far more than the little that Bucky gives him. So he sits beside Steve, allows himself to be held, and wonders if the hollow feeling under his skin will ever go away.

.

.

Hydra soldiers have a nasty habit of swallowing cyanide when captured. It puts a real damper on interrogation—not that it looks like too much fun for the brainwashed bastards when they’re foaming at the mouth. Just the same, the Howling Commandos have been operating for months, and even after dozens of missions, they’ve yet to take a single Hydra operative alive.

It’s Dernier who has the idea. He spits off some spiel in rapid-fire French, which Bucky can follow better than anyone besides Gabe, but he doesn’t volunteer to translate today.

Gabe shoots him a wary look, maybe nervous to tell Steve what Dernier just suggested.

“Jacques saw a Nazi while he was scouting,” says Gabe. “Injured and alone.”

“A deserter?” Steve asks.

“No,” says Gabe. “Just separated from his battalion, probably. He was trying to radio in his location.”

“Then we better move,” says Jim. “We don’t need a Nazi battalion breathing down our necks.”

Dernier gives Gabe a sharp look and says, “ _Dites-lui_.”

_Tell him._

Gabe seems hesitant to translate the rest, so Bucky steps in. “This Kraut could be useful. He’s been working ten miles from the base we’re about to blow to hell. He’s bound to know something.”

Steve falls quiet for a long moment, a frown pulling at his eyes more than his mouth. “Are you suggesting that, or did Jacques?” he asks.

“Me,” Dernier says.

Bucky fidgets with the handle of his combat knife. Getting Steve on board with this might not be easy, so he better choose his words carefully. “I think it’s a damn good idea. Nazis don’t stuff cyanide capsules in their dental work, so we have a shot at getting useful information out of him.”

“And how should we go about that?” Steve asks coolly.

He’s looking around at all of them, but Bucky knows that question is directed at him.

“He might not need much persuading,” says Dum Dum. “It ain’t like the Nazis are too fond of Hydra these days.”

Falsworth shrugs. “Dugan has a point. ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ and all that rubbish.”

“I don’t like it,” says Gabe, voice quiet but firm. “We’re better than this.”

Bucky pulls Steve aside and whispers, “It doesn’t have to be like you’re thinking. We don’t need to torture the guy, just scare him. Make a few ugly threats, rough him up a little, and he’ll probably sing like a bird if he knows anything. Why would a Nazi protect Hydra when Schmidt’s been telling Hitler to fuck off for months?”

He squeezes Steve’s shoulder and gives him the steady, meaningful look that promises _till the end of the line_ without having to say a word. It’s a low move, but Bucky’s fallen too far to worry much about it.

It turns out that catching a lone Nazi is easy, but finding a place to question him is harder. They’re in the middle of nowhere, some backwater piece of Poland between places that matter. Just close enough to their enemies that a loud captive could draw unwanted attention. If their friend is cooperative, things will stay quiet enough, but if he isn’t—well, it might be best to interrogate him inside somewhere.

Falsworth pokes the Nazi in the back with his rifle, none too gently. “Move it.”

The Nazi tries to say something, but his mouth is stuffed with one of Dum Dum’s dirty socks and gagged with Jim’s bandana.

They come across a small, deserted church. It might have been a beautiful place once, all carved stone and high windows, but the war has ruined it just like everything else. Still, it’s mostly intact, which is more than can be said for the handful of crumbling cottages they’ve passed.

“This’ll do,” Bucky says, even though it isn’t really his call. The Commandos follow him anyway.

Steve tells Gabe to lookout, while the others make camp in the nave. Bucky takes their captive to the north transept—out of his comrades’ sight, if not earshot—pushes him to his knees, unties the gag, and pulls Dum Dum’s rancid sock out of his mouth. The man vomits, then glares up at Bucky with impressive disdain for someone who just lost his lunch on an enemy’s boots.

“Do you speak English, Klaus?”

His pale eyes narrow. “My name isn’t Klaus, you arrogant—”

Bucky kicks him in the gut, smearing the front of his ragged uniform with puke. Klaus doubles over, hissing, struggling against the rope that keeps his hands tied behind his back. “Today, your name is whatever I fucking say it is. We understand each other?”

He straightens up, lifts his chin, and says, “ _Verpiss dich_.”

“Now that’s just rude.” Bucky kicks him again, then twice more, until Klaus falls onto his side and curls up, vainly trying to to protect his middle.

Bucky crouches down and tugs at the double lightning bolt insignia on his collar. “A real, live SS officer. I feel so honored to meet you, Klaus. Do you feel honored to meet me?”

He sticks his dog tags into Klaus’s face, so he can get a good, long look at the _H_ engraved there that got him singled out for Zola’s special attention back at Kreischberg.

Klaus’s expression curdles, twisting from angry to disgusted, but he’s smart enough not to speak.

Bucky drags the Nazi back to his knees, then stands over him. “Look, pal, this can be an easy conversation. We don’t even care about your people. You might’ve noticed from our fearless leader’s uniform that we’re Captain America’s men. If you’re any more important than cannon fodder, you know what that means.”

Klaus glares at him. “You’re here for Hydra.”

“Bingo,” says Bucky. He draws his knife and taps it against his thigh. Not exactly subtle, but it must get the point across, because Klaus’s breathing grows shorter.

“I’m not telling you anything,” he says.

“I’d say that’s a shame...” Bucky grins as widely as he can. “But I’m kind of glad you don’t want to cooperate.”

The part that scares him is this: he isn’t lying at all.

Just as he reaches for Klaus, Bucky hears the air in the transept change. Shifting to accommodate another man’s breaths, and he knows without looking that Steve is standing a few feet behind him.

“Sergeant Barnes, a word.”

He sighs, pats the Nazi on the cheek, and says, “I’ll be right back.”

Bucky can feel Klaus glaring at him as he walks over to Steve, his hate and fear burning between his shoulder blades.

Steve pulls him aside and whispers, “Bucky, what are you doing?”

Bucky sheathes his combat knife and shrugs. “Getting some answers.”

“Not like this,” Steve says. He’s shaking his head, his grip growing hard enough to hurt. Bucky might even have a bruise there soon, not that it will last. Nothing lasts anymore, except for the battle in his head.

“Why not? You think Doctor Zola had a crisis of conscience at that factory? When he was shooting me up full of drugs, and zapping my brain until I forgot my own mother’s face?”

“Buck…” The softness in Steve’s eyes, so wounded, so _pitying_ , hurts more than any electric shock ever could.

“Don’t,” Bucky says. Then he rips his arm out of Steve’s grasp and glances at Klaus. The Nazi seems to be too busy praying to pay much attention to his captors. “You know he deserves worse than I’m likely to give him.”

Steve’s concern hardens into self-righteousness right before Bucky’s eyes. “We aren’t in Kreischberg, and this man isn’t Zola.”

Bucky walks back to Klaus. “Nah, he’s just your regular, run of the mill Nazi. Nobody important. Ain’t that right?”

“ _Leck mich am Arsch_.”

He bends over, grabs Klaus by the chin, squeezes until his thin lips purse, and says, “Don’t go giving out invitations you don’t mean, sweetheart.”

The fear in Klaus’s eyes darkens, grows deeper and more disgusted. Let him prepare for the worst, like Bucky had to.

Then he stands straighter, turns to Steve. “This piece of shit might not be Zola, but he’s capturing people like me and doing a hell of a lot worse than roughing them up.”

Steve nods at Klaus, arms crossed over his chest. “Do you wanna be like them, or do you wanna be better than them?”

“Better?” Bucky can’t quite make himself smile. “That ship sailed for me a long time ago, Stevie.”

There it is again, that sad, injured look that Steve wears when he sees something he can’t fix, someone he can’t protect.

“But you’re right about one thing,” Bucky says. “This is beneath me. Too easy, you know?”

He unties Klaus and gives the Nazi room to stand. He sways on his feet, but there’s a hardness drawn along the lines of his arms, the set of his jaw. Good. He’ll put up a fight.

“Here’s how this is gonna work. You beat me, you go free. I beat you—well, I’ll still make you talk.” Bucky opens his arms in invitation. “Only it’s more fair-like, so Captain America doesn’t have to get his hands dirty.”

Steve bristles at that, but when Bucky throws a punch that knocks Klaus flat on his ass, he doesn’t say a word.

.

.

Steve doesn’t say much of anything else to him for the next three weeks either, and he stops looking for discreet places to sneak off to. It isn’t that there’s suddenly a greater distance between them; that distance has been there since Bucky shipped out, growing wider with every kill he makes. But now Steve can finally see the ugly shape that war has twisted him into, and maybe, now that he understands, he wants to end this thing between them.

That should ease his guilt about fucking Steve, but it doesn’t. It only hurts.

.

.

A Hydra goon with poor aim and no sense of self-preservation shoots Bucky in the shoulder. The soldier had been going for his heart, but he misses by a good three inches. Bucky doesn’t miss when he shoots back.

By the time Steve carries him out of the weapons factory, the whole left side of Bucky’s coat is stained with blood. Morita performs surgery in the middle of a field of forget-me-nots while Steve holds him down.

“I’m sorry,” he keeps saying. “I should’ve—I’m sorry, Buck—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Bucky hisses. “ _You_ didn’t shoot me, now did you, dollface?”

Steve blushes and glances at Morita, who is studiously, silently stitching Bucky’s gunshot wound closed.

He feels loopy, light-headed, and his shoulder is on fire. Compared to the serum that Zola pumped him full of, the pain is mild, but it isn’t exactly a tickle.

Morita holds up a bloody bullet and asks, “Wanna save it, Sarge?”

“Why not?”

Steve stares at the bullet like he plans to melt it down to scrap metal. “You’re really keeping that?”

Bucky tries to sit up, but his left arm won’t support him, and he falls back to the ground, grunting. “Yeah. Gonna carry it in my pocket for good luck.”

“Good luck?” Steve asks.

He’s laughing, even though he can barely think straight. “Maybe the next one will land where it’s s’posed to...”

The last thing Bucky sees before he passes out is Steve’s stricken face.

.

.

He dreams of the Hebrews sacrificing lambs to Yahweh, burning something clean and whole to appease a demanding god.

Red fire, blue funeral flowers, red blood, blue serum.

_Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee._

Counting beads on a rosary—

Punching a bully who dares to hurt Steve—

Scrubbing a cathedral floor all alone—

Scrubbing the bright splatter of his father’s brains off the bathroom wall so Ma won’t have to do it—

_Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death._

He’s gonna die, he’s gonna die right here on this table. Killed by the piercing of a thousand syringes. Killed by a draft letter hidden under his mattress. Killed by a bullet to the shoulder. Killed by a bullet to the head.

_Amen_.

.

.


	6. INTERLUDE: just give me a chance

.

.

**INTERLUDE: just give me a chance**

_From the other side, he thinks, there might be nothing quite as sad as uneven devotion; but from his side, there’s nothing quite as pitiful._

**{1941}**

.

.

War is coming. A year ago, after France fell to the Nazis, he and Steve had to sign up for the first peacetime draft their country has ever known. Sure, the President keeps saying that this isn’t their fight, and that he won’t send American boys to die on foreign soil. Roosevelt might even mean that, but peace isn’t the exclusive property of the United States, and it doesn’t belong only on this side of the Atlantic. It’s just a matter of time, Bucky thinks, until his number comes up.

.

.

There’s a lie that Bucky has been telling since he was fourteen years old, one so well-worn and comforting that he usually forgets it isn’t the truth: that he and Steve are like brothers to each other.

It’s a good answer to pull out of his pocket when the butcher’s wife asks, “Are you and little Steven _still_ living together?” Or when Mrs. Bukowski, their downstairs neighbor, looks between them with sharp, narrowed eyes and says they ought to be married to nice girls by now.

Old busybodies are suspicious of their living arrangement because it isn’t normal for bachelors like the two of them to room together for so long. Maybe Steve’s intentions aren’t completely pure, but Bucky’s are innocent enough. The fact is, Sarah Rogers has been dead for five years now, and someone has to take care of her son. To make sure Steve survives long enough to become the great man that Bucky knows he can be.

Today their landlord, Mr. Miller, puts the accusation plainer than Bucky has ever heard it. “You fellas better not be up to any funny business. Don’t think I won’t call the cops on you if you are.”

“Christ, no,” Bucky says, laughing. “Do I look like a fairy to you?”

It isn’t hard to the summon the kind of indignation that will soothe an asshole like Mr. Miller, but it isn’t quite easy either. Not with Steve right next to him, standing too-still and too-quiet.

“Besides, we’re just like brothers.” Bucky only looks at Mr. Miller because he’s afraid to meet Steve’s eyes right now. He’s seen that blank, injured-on-the-inside look a hundred times before, and he doesn’t want to see it again.

Mr. Miller shrugs. “Well if you don’t want people to think you’re a couple of queers, maybe find yourselves some pretty dames and settle down.”

Bucky slaps Mr. Miller on the shoulder. “One woman for the rest of my life? Doesn’t sound like my idea of fun.”

Later, upstairs in their matchbox bedroom, Steve is startlingly quiet. He’s barely said a word all night, and every time Bucky tries to talk to him, he gives one-word answers or none at all, busying himself with sketching or chores. Bucky can’t figure it out, because even when Steve is on the verge of pneumonia, his smart mouth is usually running.

“So what do you say, should we go find ourselves a pair of beautiful sisters to marry?”

Steve snorts. He’s drawing again, and his eyes never lift from his sketchbook when he says, “I’d rather not make some poor girl a widow.”

It’s not the first time he’s said something like that, and Bucky doesn’t like it any better now than he did when they were dumb kids.

“I don’t know why you think that’s a good joke,” Bucky says. “There’s nothing funny about you dying.”

Steve scratches through something on the page, his thick brows furrowed. “It’s not supposed to be funny. Just true.”

“Yeah, well you don’t have any idea how long you’ve got,” Bucky says. “Ain’t Father McMullen always saying that shit is up to God?”

“God’s the one who gave me weak lungs, a crooked back, and a bad heart.” Steve doesn’t even look angry, just matter-of-fact. He smiles when he says, “God made me blind to every color but blue, and still let me be an artist. All of that’s okay, it’s who I am, but I’ve gotta face facts—and you do too.”

The scratch of a pencil against paper suddenly sounds loud and grating in the cold quiet of their apartment. So Bucky gets out of bed, strides over, and snatches the sketchbook out of Steve’s hands.

Whatever he was going to say dies in his throat, because Steve was working on sketches of _him_. Bucky, lying back in bed, shirtless, one arm thrown casually across his chest, the other behind his head. Bucky, kissing some girl with his tie undone and his shirt untucked. Bucky biting his lip, running a hand through his hair, laughing and smiling—

He snaps the sketchbook closed and hands it back to Steve.

Bucky doesn’t say anything, and Steve doesn’t try to explain what he’s been drawing. They don’t talk for the rest of the night, and in the morning, it’s almost like nothing even happened.

.

.

Steve is in love with him. It isn’t just a long-standing crush, or a perversion fed by years of proximity. Steve _loves_ him, the way husbands and wives sometimes love each other, and Bucky feels like an idiot for not noticing it until now.

It should repulse him—and in a way, it does. But he could never hate Steve, least of all over his too-big heart. And underneath the knee-jerk sickness he’s always felt at the idea of Steve wanting him like _that_ , it’s almost flattering. Steve is a hell of a guy, the best Bucky has ever known. If he was a woman—a delicate, blonde dame with a sharp sense of humor and a moral compass that only points north—Bucky would’ve been married years ago.

That’s not a thought he’s particularly comfortable entertaining, so instead of thinking about it, he takes Liza Romano on a date. She’s a pretty thing, all legs and eyes, smart and funny too, if a little stuck up. Bucky takes Liza to a dance hall that her ma would faint if she saw, then to Della’s Diner. Over fries and milkshakes, she tells him about the girl’s college she goes to in Massachusetts.

“I missed my family, of course, but it’s a little boring to be back in Brooklyn,” she says, between dainty sips of her vanilla shake. “Nobody ever gets out of here, you know? I want more than that.”

Bucky stuffs a handful of fries in his mouth so he won’t have to respond. He wonders what Liza would think if he told her that he dropped out of school when he was thirteen. That he’s never worked any jobs except ones that use the strength of his back, because that’s all he’s fit for. It probably wouldn’t surprise her anyway. Her brother Donny introduced them, and Donny only knows him because they used to work together at Mr. Romano’s speakeasy. Not exactly clean work, except Donny was training to take over his father’s business, and Bucky was hired to haul crates and run hooch across New York.

“You in there?” Liza says. “I asked you a question.”

“Sorry. I’ll pay you nothing but the closest attention for the rest of the night.” Bucky reaches across the table and takes her hand. “Now what’d you ask?”

She tilts her head and looks up, smiling. “Hmm. I don’t know if I should repeat myself.”

_Goddamn_ , Bucky thinks, but all he says is, “I wish you would. I don’t wanna miss anything you say, sweetheart.”

Liza wraps her hand around his wrist, gentle but not entirely innocent, not with the way she’s stroking his pulse point in small, slow circles. “Well, I was just wondering what you’re looking for. Dancing and dinner is real nice, but it’d be good to know if I should expect anything more.”

Bucky grins. “More as in seeing each other again?”

She leans closer and whispers, “I was thinking of something in the more immediate future.”

Bucky pays for their dinner and takes Liza back to his apartment. Steve is asleep in their bedroom, so he carries her to the couch, drops her on the ratty cushions—ignores the way her nose scrunches up at the sight of his home—and starts kissing her. She whimpers into his mouth, hands clawing at his clothes, and tells him what she wants in no uncertain terms.

“Yes ma’am,” Bucky says. Then he pushes up her dress, pulls her stockings and panties off, and settles between her legs, licking and sucking at her sex until she’s crying out, pulling at his hair, growing slick with his spit and her own arousal. She’s hot and soft under his mouth, the rich smell and sharp taste of her making him so hard that he feels like he might come in his pants. It’s been a long time, too long, and Liza is obscenely wet, whining his given name, begging him to have her harder, faster, demanding more, more, more until she comes.

Bucky gives her a minute to catch her breath, then he reaches for his belt, so wound up his hands are shaking.

But Liza gets off the couch, pulls on her clothes, and straightens her skirt. “Not this time,” she says. “It’s a little quick to go all the way.”

Bucky stands, takes hold of her chin, and leans down to nip at her plump lower lip. “Then use your mouth. One good turn deserves another, right?”

Liza gives him a quick kiss, closed and perfunctory, and says, “Goodnight, James. I’ll see you later.”

Bucky doesn’t offer to walk her home, and as soon as the front door closes, he cusses, kicks the couch, and goes straight to the highest cabinet for the bottle of Jack he keeps there. It should be half-full, but he finds enough for a few shots missing. It seems Steve was having a bad night too. He drinks a big mug of whiskey, then strips out of his clothes and falls into bed, his mind pleasantly fuzzy and warm, his cock finally calmed down.

That quiet peace doesn’t last long. Bucky wakes from a half-sleep to hear Steve jerking off on the other side of their narrow room. That has to be what he’s doing, what with the sloppy slapping sound and his harsh breaths, broken only by strangled moans.

Bucky is hard again in an instant, and he wants to shout at Steve, wants to touch himself, wants to drink the rest of his whiskey and pass out. That slick, heated noise doesn’t stop, and neither do Steve’s cries, getting louder and more shameless with every breath.

Any red-blooded man couldn’t listen to things like _that_ and not get hot under the collar, especially after the night he’s had. This is what Bucky tells himself as he reaches down, wraps his hand around his cock, and thrusts up into his own touch. He tries to think of Liza, the sharp-bitter taste of her cunt, the cries that probably worked up Steve, awake on the other side of a thin wall. But Liza looked at him like he was nothing but pretty-faced trash, used him, and left, and Bucky can’t think about her without anger poisoning his pleasure.

Steve says his name, moans it, really, and Bucky isn’t so drunk that he doesn’t realize that it’s a question, an offer, an invitation.

Bucky closes his eyes so that the darkness deepens. He could be anywhere, with anyone. “Shut up, Steve.”

He only gets louder, all panting breaths and rough, quick strokes that Bucky can’t block out. And it’s a strange, selfish turn-on. Hearing Steve touching himself makes Bucky anxious if he thinks about it too much, but when he lets himself hear how helpless and lovesick Steve sounds, it makes him feel strong and powerful. He can reduce Steve—proud, strong, stubborn Steve—to a weak, needy wreck.

Bucky tries to picture Liza, but it’s undercut by Steve’s cries. Too real to be covered up by the fantasy of a girl who didn’t even want him, when he has someone who wants him more than anything, just a few feet away.

He comes when Steve says, “Bucky _, please_ ,” and he isn’t sure which one of them sets the other off.

.

.

Bucky wakes the next day with his belt unbuckled, pants open, dried come on his cock and his hand. For a moment he’s lost, muzzy-headed and half hungover, before he remembers what happened.

He runs to the bathroom, bends over the porcelain bowl, and pukes until he feels light-headed and hollowed out in every way possible. His throat burns and his mouth tastes like bile, acidic and sour. Bucky brushes his teeth and nearly vomits again at the taste of his toothpaste, then washes his hands, once, twice, three times.

He’s nauseous from the liquor, but the knowledge of what he did makes him feel far worse than a hangover ever could. Disgust, pure overpowering disgust, is ripping him open from the inside, because Steve is his to protect. Not to use just because some selfish girl did the same thing to him.

Bucky has known for years that Steve would be pitifully easy to take to bed, if he’d ever managed to find the idea anything but off-putting. Steve wants him, loves him, and that isn’t something to exploit for a quick—whatever it is he should call the thing that they did last night.

He washes his hands again, until they’re pink and abused, but still not clean.

Bucky finds Steve in the kitchen making coffee. He sets a cup on the table, made exactly the way Bucky likes it, no cream and more sugar than they can afford to waste.

“You okay?” Steve asks.

“What?”

Bucky’s heart jumps into his raw throat, but Steve just says, “I heard you puking. I guess you’re pretty hungover.”

It’s on the tip of his tongue to blame everything on the alcohol, the disaster that was last night and his sickness this morning, but instead Bucky says, “Not really.”

He looks up at Steve, and maybe it’s cruel, but it wasn’t exactly kind of Steve to initiate—what happened in their bedroom—when Bucky was drunk. If he has to live with the ugly revulsion with himself that he feels now, then Steve should too.

The expression on Steve’s face almost breaks him. His skinny jaw is clenched, lips trembling, tears brimming in his blue eyes. And that nearly unravels Bucky’s resolve, because he’s never seen Steve cry, not once in over twenty years. Bucky has spent his whole life looking out for this little punk, and now he’s hurt him on purpose. It violates every instinct Bucky has to inflict any kind of pain on Steve, but he’s so furious with himself, with Steve, that it burns through his guilt.

“I’ve got to say something, and then we’re never gonna talk about this again,” Bucky says. “You understand?”

Steve opens his mouth, like he’s trying to speak, but nothing comes out. He nods tightly.

Bucky makes himself look at Steve, because if he’s going to tear his best friend apart, then he at least owes it to him not to be a coward about it. “Last night never would’ve happened if I hadn’t been drunk, but I think you know that already.”

Steve puts his head in his hands. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, so quietly that Bucky barely hears him. “I didn’t mean to. I was drunk too, and I—I didn’t think.”

Tears slide down his red cheeks, and Bucky can’t watch it any longer, the misery and shame he’s drawn out of the most prideful person he knows. “Look, don’t beat yourself up too much. You aren’t the only one who fucked up last night.”

Steve grips his hair and stares at the table, like he could uncover an escape route there if he just looks hard enough. “You don’t want me at all, do you?” he asks.

Bucky glances away, cheeks hot. “Not the way you mean.”

That isn’t quite the truth, but he can’t tell Steve that he used his love to soothe a bruised ego. Bucky will take it to his grave before he admits that the only thing he appreciates about Steve’s lust is that it means someone truly _wants_ him.

“It’s not ‘cause you’re queer—or, sorta queer? Anyway, I don’t care about who you want to fuck, except where I’m concerned. It just isn’t something I want from a man, and—” Bucky swallows, takes a breath. “And even if I _was_ that way, you and me would never work. You’ve gotta know that by now.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, and he sounds weighed down. Wearied and downtrodden, like he’s carrying the whole world’s gravity on his crooked back. “I know how you see me. I don’t need to hear it.”

Bucky spares him that much, and although part of it’s a kindness, it’s more that he doesn’t think he could say the word _brother_ right now without panicking. Not when the memory of Steve’s moans are so fresh in his memory.

“Right.” Bucky chews his lip and wishes that there was a better way to end this. “I need to get to work.”

“Goodbye,” Steve says. Such a rote, mechanical farewell that Bucky nearly runs out the door to get away from it.

.

.

The next day, Bucky tells Steve that he’s moving out. Neither of them are surprised, but it still hurts anyway.

A week after that, the whole world knows the name Pearl Harbor, and war isn’t coming anymore; war is here.

.

.


	7. FOURTH MOVEMENT: you did everything you could

.

.

**FOURTH MOVEMENT: you did everything you could**

_Hope is the only thing he has as much of when he’s happy to die as he had when he was happy to live._

**{1944 - 1945}**

.

.

Bucky wakes in medical, being hovered over by a fussy nurse and an even fussier captain. It’s bright, cold, so white and sterile that he has to be in a real hospital, not some Army tent in the enemy’s backyard.

“Where am I?”

The nurse says, “Paris,” and even though he can tell by her accent that it’s true, Bucky looks to Steve.

“You heard right. As of two days ago, Paris is free,” Steve says, but the smile he offers is weak.

Bucky sits up, and finds that he doesn’t hurt at all. His gunshot wound barely aches, more tender than painful under its bandages. “Well that’s the best news I’ve heard in awhile. Dernier must be over the moon.”

Steve grins with more honesty and says, “You’ve got no idea. He cried when we got here, and he’s been singing ever since.”

Bucky laughs. “Well then I’m glad I was asleep.”

The nurse takes his vitals, proclaims him shockingly healthy, and runs off to the fetch the doctor. As soon as the door closes behind her, Steve takes a seat on the edge of the bed, cups Bucky’s face between his hands, and says, “I’m sorry. I know I’ve been an ass, but did you have to go and get shot? There are better ways to teach me a lesson, you jerk.”

“Well that was my grand plan,” Bucky says dryly. His cheeks burn under Steve’s touch, soldier’s hands that were always too big for his body, like he was meant to be Captain America from the very beginning. Bucky wishes they were somewhere safe, somewhere private enough that Steve could put his hands to better use.

Steve leans down, and Bucky realizes a moment before their lips can meet that he’s about to be kissed. He jerks away, grabs a handful of Steve’s uniform, and shakes his head. “Don’t make me say it. I don’t want to, and I know you sure as hell don’t wanna hear it.”

Steve pulls away, stands, and runs a hand over his unshaven jaw. He looks like hell, worse than he has since his last bout with pneumonia, pale and weary, with dirty hair and shadowed eyes. From waiting, Bucky realizes. From waiting for him to wake up.

“How long was I out for?”

“Three days,” Steve says. Then his gaze flickers to the bandage on Bucky’s chest. “I had to lie about how long ago you’d been wounded. Doctors would’ve asked too many questions otherwise.”

So Steve knows. Of course he does; he’s never missed a thing in his whole nosy life, and Bucky can’t breathe, but somehow his voice comes out steady when he asks, “When did you figure it out?”

“It wasn’t all at once, just a lot of little things that added up to the only explanation that makes sense. Why you don’t get tired like you should, and your shooting is even better than mine, and you never bother to drink anymore.” Steve runs a hand through his dirty hair. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

_Why didn’t you tell me?_ he means, but Bucky doesn’t have it in him to answer that. “So the S.S.R. and the Army can make a lab rat or a mascot out of me? I don’t think so.”

“Is that what you think I am?” Steve asks.

Bucky climbs out of bed, claps his hand on Steve’s shoulder, and says, “Of course not. You’ve got the guts and the goodness to back up being Captain America. What’ve I got? A lot of kills and a talent for not caring about them.”

“You don’t have to pretend to respect what they’ve made me into, because I sure don’t,” Steve says. He’s smiling, but there’s nothing real behind it. “A goddamn dancing monkey. That’s what I am, Buck.”

.

.

Paris is a city brought back to life. The next few days are filled with victory parades, the nights with people celebrating as wildly as they can. Everywhere he goes, Bucky finds people dancing, drinking, singing, kissing.

“There’s gonna be about a thousand bastards born here next May,” he says to Steve.

Tonight, the streets are crowded with Parisian civilians, French Resistance, and American soldiers, speaking through laughter and a pidgin of English and French.

Steve grins, wide and bright. He’s never looked more beautiful than he does in this moment with the sun’s last rays gilding his hair. “This is it, Buck. This is what we’re fighting for.”

Bucky bites his lip, looks away, and says, “It’s something else, ain’t it?”

_I want to go home_ , Bucky thinks, but it isn’t Brooklyn he thinks of. All he can see are his father’s hollow eyes, the gentle smile he saved for his wife and children, the red-pink-grey spray of blood and brains against the bathroom wall.

Bucky watches the celebrating city around him, the infectious joy that Steve and the other Commandos have been reveling in, and wishes he could celebrate with them. He can’t, though. All Bucky feels is the same aching numbness, broken only by anger and panic, that’s been consuming him since Kreischberg.

This war has made a low creature out of him, and now he knows that nothing, not even peace, will turn him back into a man.

He turns to Steve and says, “Let’s go somewhere. I don’t care where, just some place where we can be alone.”

Steve’s smile slips away, and suddenly he’s flushed, mouth turned slack and soft, eyes dark. “All right,” he says. “I’ve got an idea.”

Steve takes him to a bombed out bar near the river, abandoned and burned, its roof caved in and walls falling down. There’s nothing here but ashes and ghosts, as unromantic as a place could be, but that’s fine. All Bucky needs is comfort, distraction through touch.

They cover the ground with their dress uniforms, and Bucky pulls Steve on top of him. Runs his hands over that broad body, grasps at shoulders big enough to block out the stars, and kisses his collarbone. Small bruises never last longer than a minute on either of them, so Bucky bites and sucks until a mark surfaces, ruddy on Steve’s fair skin. Crafts it with care, then watches it fade.

He remembers Steve being so small, every line of him sharp and skinny, a fragile little thing. Now he’s vast under Bucky’s hands, his body hard, strong, still foreign.

He digs his pants out of the pile of clothes, pulls out a small tube of slick and says, “I want you to fuck me.”

It’s the first time he’s asked for it quite like this, Steve on top, in charge, in control, but right now Bucky doesn’t want to think, much less care what this might mean.

Steve doesn’t need telling twice. He kisses his way down Bucky’s belly and sucks his cock, that hot mouth working him halfway to coming already. His wet fingers tease, then slide inside of Bucky, stretching and opening until he’s ready to take more.

But Steve hesitates, and Bucky hates having a moment to breathe, because then all he can feel is that maw of darkness and dirt at his core. He grabs Steve by the hair, wraps his legs around his waist, and says, “C’mon, get in me.”

Bucky closes his eyes as Steve pushes his cock inside of him, lets his mind drift far away while his body just _feels_. Overwhelmed by pleasure, hearing nothing but lewd sounds and his own panting, the hot ache where they’re joined.

“Look at me,” Steve whispers. “Please.”

He looks up at Steve, rocking above him, into him, and it’s so much, too much. Seeing his blue eyes, full of tender want, the softness of his lips. His familiar-but-not face and stranger’s body. But for once there’s too much fear eating at him to care what he and Steve used to be to each other. This is all that matters, the way their bodies fit together, the mindless relief he feels every time Steve thrusts into him.

“God, you’re—you feel so—” Steve bows his head to the crook of Bucky’s neck and starts licking, sucking, biting. He works his way up, until he’s kissing right beside Bucky’s mouth, stealing as close to that intimacy as he’s allowed.

Bucky scratches at Steve’s perfect back, then holds on tight with one hand while he strokes his own cock with the other. It feels like a gentle electricity traveling up his spine— _so far from the volts Zola shocked him with_ —the pleasure stiffening his legs, lifting his hips off the ground to meet each rough thrust.

He comes in his fist, crying out too loud, so loud that Steve clamps a hand over his mouth—

_He’s back in the lab with a rubber guard between his teeth, blocking out his voice, muzzling his screams._

Bucky beats at Steve’s chest until he gets off of him, his eyes wide, cock still hard. “Jesus, are you okay? Buck?”

He climbs to his feet on coltish legs, still weak from coming, stumbles over to a fallen-down wall and dry heaves over the edge. There’s nothing in his stomach, not even bile, and it isn’t that he’s sick in his body, only sick in the head. He braces his hands against the burned out wall and takes short, shallow breaths that only build on each other, growing sharper and more smothering by the second. The bite of the broken bricks, pricking his palms, helps ground him. Bucky focuses on that small pain until he can breathe right again.

Steve opens his mouth, on the verge of asking questions that can’t be answered, so Bucky kisses him. Their first, something Bucky didn’t even know he wanted until he has Steve’s taste on his tongue, feels those pretty lips under his own.

Bucky pushes Steve to the ground, straddles his lap, and says, “We’re not done yet.”

Zola has taken too much, and Bucky won’t let him have this too.

.

.

The next morning, the Commandos receive orders to return to London immediately, but Bucky complains that his wound is hurting too much for travel.

“Guess we’ll have to wait around here for another day,” Steve says, smiling. “Wouldn’t want to risk your delicate health, Sergeant Barnes.”

Dernier wraps his arms around Bucky and says, “Thank you.”

Bucky fights the urge to throw him off. He trusts Dernier with his life, but touch from anyone besides Steve still only makes him think of the table, the blue serum burning through him, Zola’s babyish hands all over his body—

Bucky disentangles himself and grips Dernier’s shoulder. “C’mon, you’d do the same for me if we were in New York.”

Dernier says in English, “I hope you do not know this feeling.” Then in French, _“It’s an emptiness made whole again. The kind of relief you can only find after the worst suffering. Do you understand?”_

Bucky swallows, his throat suddenly tight. “ _Oui._ I understand.”

.

.

Bucky picks up a journal in Paris. He wants to start writing again, the way he used to before the war. It’s a habit he picked up as a teenager, but he let it go when he shipped out. He hasn’t written anything in the last two years except for letters home—and those have been sparing enough, much to his mother’s disappointment.

He waits until he’s back in London, in the privacy of his own small quarters, to put pen to paper. After a nightmare, he writes.

_I’m tired, so tired that I don’t know how I’m putting one foot in front of the other. My only dreams are of that fucking table, the smell of piss in the air, the sting of venom filling me up, drowning me in fire. Whatever Zola did to me unzipped my skin, pulled out the best of me, then closed me back up with some ugly thing inside, and I can’t figure out how to put myself back together right._

After he pushes Steve against an alley wall and sucks him, Bucky comes back home and writes.

_I’ve gotta be some kind of queer, because I like what me and Steve do together even more than being with a woman. Maybe it should bother me, sinning like this, but I’ve done so much worse that it seems stupid to worry about hell or a dishonorable discharge._

_That isn’t what bothers me. It’s wanting the man Steve is now without having wanted the man he used to be. It’s looking into his eyes full of love and being unable to give anything back. It’s taking taking taking from someone who’ll never stop giving._

After their team destroys another Hydra factory, Bucky looks at the freed American soldiers around him and sees nothing but men who would sell their souls for the war to end, if only they hadn’t sold them to the U.S. Army already.

Bucky lies on the hard ground, counting stars and thinking about the Colt strapped to his hip. When he can’t sleep, he gets up, turns to the next blank page of his journal, and writes.

_We’ll never go home in one piece, not any of us. Maybe it would be better if we didn’t go home at all._

.

.

Cameramen come to London to shoot footage of Captain America and his Commandos in action.

“By action, we mean standing around with unloaded rifles looking heroic and pretty,” Colonel Phillips tells them, like that wasn’t obvious already.

Dernier can barely understand what’s being said to him, Dum Dum is too drunk to follow instructions, and Bucky is too tired to give a fuck. Steve cooperates, because he’s played a symbol too long to be much bothered by cameras.

The director is a tall, perfectly dressed man named Daniel Novak, who tells Steve that he’s far too handsome to hide under his cowl. “One good look at that face, and a thousand ladies will open up their purses to buy war bonds.”

When Steve takes off his cowl, blushing, Bucky walks up to him and whispers in his ear, “I think Novak wants to open his purse for you too.”

Steve tries not to crack up and fails, which sets Bucky off laughing too. It isn’t until his sides are aching that he realizes they’re being recorded, but he doesn’t mind. He likes the idea that in a hundred years people in the future might see this footage playing in a museum. That they’ll be able to look back at Captain America and see him as a man, laughing with a friend, and know that Steve Rogers was more than a star spangled suit.

.

.

One of the S.S.R.’s spies brings the news that Arnim Zola will be traveling in the Alps by train in one week. Steve and Phillips throw together a plan to attack the train, while Bucky makes a plan of his own. They’re talking about taking the doctor alive, knocking him out with a tranquilizer before he has time to swallow a mouthful of cyanide.

He wants to tell them not to waste any drugs on Zola; the doctor is a selfish little worm bent on survival, and he’d never sacrifice his life for Hydra. Instead, Bucky practices his perfect shooting at the range and imagines putting bullets through Zola’s kneecaps, his groin, his gut, his throat, his head. That’s the order he’ll shoot him in, when he gets the chance. Then he’ll take one of those unnatural weapons that Zola designed and disintegrate his corpse with it.

And when that’s done, when he’s claimed a small measure of the justice owed to him, Bucky’s going to take his Colt, put it to his head, and pull the trigger.

This is what he wants, what he needs, more than anything. It’s a desire he’s been circling since Kreischberg, an end he’s been inexorably drawn toward like a ship to the eye of a hurricane. And at the heart of the storm, Bucky finds his own center. All the fury, the desperation, the panic, the fear he’s been fighting through—it calms. _He_ calms. The peace he’s been seeking was within him all along, and what it took to find it was seizing his own fate.

Bucky writes letters to his mother, his sisters, the other Commandos, and Steve. He chooses his words with care, trying to answer grief with comfort. These notes are the last that they’ll have of him, and he wants them to be perfect.

.

.

“What do you want to do when we go home?” Steve asks, his voice hushed in the softness of the night.

They’re lying side by side in the frost-laden grass, half-naked, sweaty, and sated. It was stupid to suck each other off here, in a public park of all places, but Bucky wanted one last night out in the elements, a final look at the world he’s about to give up.

“I’m getting a milkshake from Della’s Diner,” Bucky says. “A vanilla one. I swear to Christ, there isn’t much I wouldn’t do for one of those.”

It’s stupid, but the thought of a milkshake from Della’s truly _does_ make Bucky think twice about what he’s planning to do. It isn’t that he believes something so small would be worth living for, but for a moment, at least, he wishes he could stick around long enough for a fucking vanilla milkshake.

“No, I mean, about us,” Steve says. “Is this—whatever it is we’ve got together—is it gonna stop after the war is over?”

It’s going to stop in two days, but Bucky can’t tell that hard truth. So he says, “You’re the best thing I’ve got, you know that?”

“Yeah?” Steve asks.

There’s such terrible vulnerability threaded through his voice that it tears at Bucky’s heart to hear. He pulls Steve close, says his name, and holds him tight. Then he kisses Steve, slow and deep, savoring this, the last sweet secret they’ll be safe to share.

.

.

An hour after they part ways, Bucky throws his journal into the Thames, seals his letter to Steve, and leaves it locked in his desk with the others.

A lie isn’t so wrong if it’s delivered out of kindness. This is what Bucky tells himself.

.

.

When blue light blasts Bucky out of the train and into the open air, he grabs a railing and clings to it, heart in his throat, his skin alive with every sharp prick of winter wind. It isn’t supposed to be like this, this isn’t how he’s supposed to die—Zola should be gone, he ought to have had a moment to get his mind in order, and it terrifies him more than the ravine below his feet, the realization that this too has been taken out of his control.

But if he falls, he won’t have to work up the courage to shoot himself. And Steve—

Steve is calling his name, reaching for him, screaming, “Grab my hand!”

Bucky feels the rail weakening, its bolts giving way beneath his weight and the wind. If he hurries, he could take Steve’s hand, but it would be easier, so much easier, to just let go.

Then he looks at Steve, his beautiful face twisted with pure fear, and Bucky knows that he can’t leave him behind.

So he reaches for Steve’s hand, and he thinks, for the first time since Zola’s table, _I don’t want to die_.

.

.


	8. CODA: i’m following him

.

.

**CODA: i’m following him**

_This is the truest lie he’ll ever tell: there’s never enough time._

**{2014 - 2016}**

.

.

He keeps journals, handwritten books full of patchwork memories:

.

.

MISSION REPORT #13

snow white snow white snow

prick her finger

prick her shoulder

prick her arm

red on the white on the black

blood on the snow on the blood on my hands

3 drops

2 hands

1 hand

three two

One Nine Seventeen Longing Rusted Homecoming Benign

homecoming

coming

home home home

where are we going?

d.c.

brooklyn

london

azzano

kreischberg

siberia

new york

brooklyn

Freight Car

where are we going?

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MISSION REPORT #33

The man on the bridge. I met him on a previous assignment.

A symbol to the nation.

A hero to the world.

The story of Captain America is one of honor, bravery, and sacrifice.

The world’s first supersoldier.

a symbol a nation a hero an honor a sacrifice

_A goddamn dancing monkey. That’s what I am, Buck._

I might even go dancing.

What are we waiting for?

A partner.

The right partner.

I might even go dancing.

When all of this is over.

There is a man on the bridge. I met him on a previous assignment.

.

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MISSION REPORT #34

My face is on a glass wall at a museum. I think it is my face. It looked back at me from the wall the same way my face looks back at me from the mirror. But maybe it is not mine.

.

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MISSION REPORT #47

There is a red book with a star on the front, like the star on my arm. Hydra built the arm and wired it into me. Hydra built the book and wired it into me. They erased me, rewrote me, remade me. The book is a weapon and the arm is a weapon and I am a weapon. We are all Hydra weapons stamped with red stars.

.

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MISSION REPORT #58

I’m waking up after a long, long time asleep.

I own the clothes I’m wearing, the knife in my belt, the backpack I carry, the gun inside of it, this notebook, and the pen I’m writing with.

Yellow light spills through the window, but I don’t want to go out in it. I know how not to be noticed, but I’m not afraid of being seen by people. I’m afraid of being seen by the sun.

This is stupid. The sun doesn’t see anything. The sun is inorganic and it doesn’t have eyes. It’s just a star, like the star on my arm, on the book, on me. The sun has no eyes, but I’m still afraid that it will see me.

.

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MISSION REPORT #65

I am not

I am not a thing

I am not a machine

I am not a soldier

I am a human

I am a

I am

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MISSION REPORT #71

An auburn-haired woman in a white lab coat. I call her Waterhouse. I choke her until her face turns blue.

An old man in a fancy suit. I call him Dapper Dan. I slit his throat.

No witnesses, they say. No exceptions.

The mother goes down with a single shot to the heart. I call her One Hit Wonder. Her little girl has blonde curls, but they turn red red red when I shoot her in the back of the head. I call her Goldilocks.

There were no exceptions until the man on the bridge. I remember the exceptions I didn’t make. Sometimes I think I remember all of them, but I never do.

.

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MISSION REPORT #102

The man on the bridge is not just on a bridge these days. He’s everywhere. In the newspapers, on the television, on the radio, all over the internet. Yesterday I heard two teenagers on the subway talking about how sassy Captain America’s twitter account is, and I thought: _Sounds like Steve._

Steve, who was ninety-five pounds of righteous asthmatic fury before the serum. Now he’s nearly indestructible, but still righteous.

I know who the man on the bridge is. I _know_ him.

.

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MISSION REPORT #110

There’s a red book somewhere that can unmake me. It has a star on the cover and weapon schematics inside. A blueprint to build your own Winter Soldier.

Ten little words can bury me beneath Hydra’s programming. I’m going to dig myself out again, but I don’t know how many words it will take.

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MISSION REPORT #117

I used to write. Before the war, during the war. Not after the war. The war is still going, at least inside my head.

Steve had his sketchbooks and I had my journals. We looked at the world and then put it to paper. How it really was, how it might’ve been, how we thought it should be. His work was drawn and mine was written, but they were the same.

This isn’t the way I used to write. I can’t remember the stories I told, but I know how they fit together. Sentences that wound around each other. Tied up, pulled apart. Big words, small words, with pieces of me running through them. Now I write like a machine. When I read it out loud I sound like a robot. At least I’m a robot that wants to be human again.

Once upon a time, my words were pretty. Now they’re just gunshots.

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MISSION REPORT #131

I’m awake now. I’m so awake that I can’t sleep. When I close my eyes, I see them: Goldilocks and Dapper Dan and so many others. More than I can count or keep up with.

I don’t do that anymore, but turning over a new leaf doesn’t help a little yellow-haired girl with a bullet in her brain, now does it? It feels like I was sleepwalking when I killed all those people. Like some other-me pulled the triggers, held the knives, detonated the bombs. It doesn’t matter, because my victims are just as dead as if I’d done it on purpose. My ledger is still in the red.

The chair and the book and the ice are far away, but sometimes I miss them. Sometimes I just want to go back to sleep.

.

.

MISSION REPORT #139

Steve is looking for me. The airman called Sam Wilson is helping him. I wonder if they’re fucking, until I remember that Steve loved (loves) me. Maybe I loved him too, but Sergeant Barnes was a long time ago, and I can barely remember my time with Steve anyway.

He looks for me in Brooklyn, Chicago, London, Prague, Philadelphia, Rome, and Los Angeles. I know, because the twenty-first century is full of busybodies. Every time some nosy civilian spots Captain America, they make sure to take a picture and post it on facebook, twitter, instagram, tumblr. Steve can’t go anywhere in public without running into an audience.

This morning I grabbed a magazine from the grocery store because Steve’s face was on it. Inside, I found a photo of him standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. I can’t stop looking at that picture. It’s not bad for a selfie, even though Steve’s smile is sad and the angles of his cheeks are too sharp. He still looks like a Greek god, but maybe a Greek god with a hangover.

He tweeted the picture with a caption: _wish you were here._

I remember the Grand Canyon. Only in spotty black and white, but I remember. A photo in the newspaper. I clipped it out and kept it in my journal. I told Steve that someday we should go to Arizona and see it in person. Steve smiled and said, _Sure, Buck. Of course_.

_Someday_ turned out to be further away than we could’ve guessed, and Steve went to the Grand Canyon alone. It’s a dirty move, trying to guilt me into coming back. These days the whole world seems to think Steve only fights fair, but that’s bullshit. If the stakes are high enough, he’ll do whatever it takes to get the job done.

.

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MISSION REPORT #141

_You’re my mission_. That’s the last thing I said to him before he fell into the Potomac. I guess I’m his mission now.

.

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MISSION REPORT #155

My flashbacks are always bright and loud, distorted around the edges. It’s like falling into a past full of funhouse mirrors. Too-real and not-real at the same time. Writing helps a little, and on the days when my memory won’t backtrack any further than Project Insight, it gives me something to cling to.

I keep seeing that pub in London. The one where Steve recruited me to the Howling Commandos. In my dream, the music is always frantic, manic. There’s an eerie, euphoric air to the whole place, too cheerful for a pub full of soldiers. The men make toasts with tankards full of blood, and there’s usually one fella who won’t stop laughing, even though his whole chest is riddled with bullet holes.

Steve is there too. He sits at the bar with me, just like he did in 1943, and asks the question I can’t get away from. _Are you ready to follow Captain America into the jaws of death?_

He smiled when he asked that. The poor fuck had no idea what was coming, and neither did I. Who knows what I said back? Probably something safer than, _I’d follow you anywhere_ , which would’ve been the honest answer.

There are some memories that I’m drawn to, again and again, and this is one of them. I can see Agent Carter’s red dress; I can taste the whiskey that wouldn’t get me drunk; I can hear Steve’s voice, wry and teasing. This moment grabs me by the throat and won’t let go.

I might never remember exactly what I said to Steve, but I know that it boiled down to a promise: _I’m with you till the end of the line_. And I was, as much as I could be, I was with him right up to the moment when I fell. I found the end of the line at the bottom of a ravine, and then Hydra found me.

I wish I’d given Steve a different answer. That I’d just said, _No. I’m not with you for this one, pal. I’m going home._

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MISSION REPORT #167

I pay close attention to colors. It’s a habit I picked up as a kid, looking out for what Steve could and couldn’t see. That’s why I wore blue all the time. It was the only color Steve wasn’t blind to, and before the war, I always wanted him to see me as I was. During the war, it didn’t matter. Steve could see everything, whether I wanted him to or not.

Hydra shocked my individuality out of me five thousand volts at a time, but thinking through color is a habit that their conditioning never quite erased. I wasn’t supposed to feel anything, wasn’t supposed to refuse any order. And I didn’t; weapons are always obedient.

But even when I couldn’t understand why, I hated the color red. I remember slitting Dapper Dan’s throat, watching the life flood of out of him, and thinking, _There is too much red. There is too much red and I don’t like it._

I still hate red. It’s the color of blood and debts owed and that goddamn book. You can tear down the whole world with red.

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MISSION REPORT #184

Right after Sarah died, Steve and I shared an apartment in Red Hook. It had too little space, too many roaches, and no insulation. But it was ours, and we loved it.

I only remember bits and pieces of that apartment. A couch that needed to be reupholstered for as long as we had it. Windows covered in newspapers. Two rickety cots that lived on opposite sides of the only bedroom. There wasn’t much privacy to be had, so we could hear each other’s nighttime noises. Wheezing, coughing, turning this way and that.

We jerked off at the same time once, on a cold winter night in ‘41, or maybe ‘42. Steve started it, and it seemed like he made it loud on purpose, probably to see if I’d do something. I did, I think. Touched myself while I listened to Steve doing the same thing. I got sick when I woke up the next day, hungover as all hell, but I can’t remember what happened after that.

We loved that shitty apartment in Red Hook, and I wish we’d stayed there forever.

.

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MISSION REPORT #187

I don’t wear blue anymore. I don’t have any reason to.

.

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MISSION REPORT #190

We were lovers. I know that much, even if the details are vague. There was a gnawing emptiness that hollowed me out, and nothing could fill it up or soothe it besides touch. Nothing could make me feel safe except for Steve.

But I don’t remember loving him. I must have, though. I must have.

.

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MISSION REPORT #199

Zola called me Sergeant Barnes. Hydra called me the asset. The Army called me 32557038. History calls me the Winter Soldier. But I don’t want to be a sergeant, an asset, a number, a soldier. I want to be a man left alone, and my name is Bucky.

I wonder what Steve would call me, if he could see me now. Maybe someday I’ll find out.

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MISSION REPORT #201

Where are we going?

_The future._

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**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Gif set: a perfect soldier](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11829381) by [shirasade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shirasade/pseuds/shirasade)
  * [Vid: Fic trailer - a perfect soldier (by SouthSideStory)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11829129) by [shirasade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shirasade/pseuds/shirasade)




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